Ryan Salzke On Creating Employment Opportunities And Uplifting People With Barriers To Work

Ryan is a social impact leader dedicated to reducing systemic employment barriers.

He is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Vanguard Laundry, a large employment-focused social enterprise that he helped establish in 2016.

Ryan re-joined Vanguard from his role as Chief Operating Officer with Orange Sky, a charity that runs the world's first free mobile laundry and shower services for the homeless, across Australia and New Zealand. In this role he focused on maximising social impact, sustainable business growth, innovative solutions, and volunteer management.

Prior to this he spent several years at Churches of Christ as Campus Manager of a large integrated community hub and commercial facility.

Before moving into the for-purpose sector, Ryan enjoyed an accelerated leadership pathway at Heritage Bank whilst attaining a Bachelor of Commerce and MBA through UniSQ.

Ryan discusses the power of employment in overcoming a multitude of individual barriers, and how uplifting one person can transform an entire community.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Emma Dimech] - Could you tell us about your background and what led to your work in social enterprise?

[Ryan Salzke] - I was born and raised in Toowoomba, Southeast Queensland. I finished school and was fortunate enough to get a great entry level position in a call centre at a local bank. Corporate environments, particularly banks, are great talent incubators. I was well supported in completing my undergrad in commerce and my MBA, as well as lots of leadership programs. After nine years in banking and learning and development roles, I was feeling ambitious, empowered, and ready to use everything I'd learned for something new.

I first discovered social enterprise in 2016, when the now Treasurer of Queensland, David Janetzki, introduced me to a friend of his, Luke Terry, who was a local social entrepreneur. At that time, Vanguard Laundry, was just a concrete slab with a big vision and lots of supporters.

I was brought on as the second employee, and it was a huge leap of faith leaving the banking sector and my comfortable corporate ladder climbing job. Luke hired me as a career development manager and my first day on the job was interviewing seventeen people who had been out of work for five years or more.

I interviewed someone who wore a three-piece tuxedo to a laundry worker interview, and I interviewed someone who broke down on the front steps at the thought of coming to meet me. It was a really powerful day.

I found it so eye-opening, and I fell in love with the possibilities that lay in front of me in the for-good sector. The rest, as they say, is history. I've worked in the not-for-profit sector ever since, in a variety of capacities. Somehow, I’ve found myself in a laundry related rabbit hole, with my last role as chief of operations with Orange Sky.

The common thread of my career in the impact space is my passion for social impact. I’m passionate about empowering people and that's what led me to where I am today. Through everything, that keeps me motivated to continue making a difference.

Would you be able to further discuss the work you do at Vanguard Laundry and the impact it has?

Vanguard Laundry uses a commercial laundry business to employ and empower people facing complex barriers to work. We have a one thousand one hundred square metre shed in Toowoomba and a washing machine the size of a bus. We process about fifty tonnes of linen each week; your home washing machine does eight kilos at a time. We process laundry for hospitals, motels, and mining camps.

The more important thing is we run an employment program alongside the laundry business. We have a program that offers twelve months of employment and wraparound support services to people who've been long-term unemployed due to complex barriers. We have a specialist employment team that provides a full suite of supports. We pay full award wages and use a network of employment partners to facilitate a transition into open employment. It creates a revolving door effect.

Ideally, we're employing people who’ve faced barriers for some time, empowering them with support and award wage work, and then transitioning them onto gainful employment out in the open market. While we don't remove the barriers, we certainly try to empower people beyond them.

Annually, we create around seventy new employment opportunities. Of the people we employ, forty percent have youth as their prevailing barrier, forty percent are refugee migrants, and twenty percent of those identify as long-term unemployed. That itself is a complex barrier. About twenty percent are First Nations and twenty percent identify mental illness as being their prevailing barrier.

Eighty-nine percent of our staff will continue employment beyond six months with us, which is a real feat. The national statistics of the traditional employment support system is down in the teens and we're at eighty-nine. We're really proud of that.

Of our staff, thirty of them will transition into long-term sustainable employment in the open market each year. That's the gold standard. Our goal is to get them out and working beyond Vanguard. Even those that don't make it will at least benefit from the program. We empower them to continue their journey of employment.

Each year, forty thousand hours are worked by transitional staff with us, and we pay just over $1.2 million in wages. There’s a real economic impact. We’re also very proud to say that we now achieve that impact without relying on external support. It's always been our ambition to be able to cover our own costs. We have to keep a close eye on it, but thanks to the support we've had to date, we've become self-sustaining and can continue to provide our impact in a sustainable way. It’s all very exciting.

Would you be able to expand upon the emotional and intrapersonal impact that Vanguard Laundry has on the people you hire?

When we first opened, we were really fortunate to have support from a number of foundations and partners, which allowed us to engage Swinburne in a longitudinal study of our impact. The legacy of that work is a real insight into the difference we’re making. The evidence showed that our program results in improved financial independence, improved health and wellbeing, and reduced dependence on welfare.

We were really interested in whether people needed less income supports and spent less time in the justice system or health system, as there’s a clear cost benefit to the government there. All of that was proven in the study, as was a reduction in housing stress. The Swinburne study points to all the right outcomes in terms of emotional health and wellbeing, as well as the tangible needs of a person.

Even so, I believe the best way to share our impact is through a story. Recently, we’ve had a staff member who settled in Toowoomba permanently in 2023, after immigrating from her country. She escaped war trauma and close family loss and came to Australia facing significant challenges in navigating mental health, language barriers, and a limited social network. She was really struggling to gain work before being referred to us.

We use referral partners to source our staff. Our partners understand the complexity of the people we're trying to help, and once she was employed with us, our specialised team worked with her on her goals and upskilling in her areas of interest. We focused on getting her confidence back and empowering her.

We helped her start a certificate three in youth work because she was really passionate about that space, and we helped her finish her skill in Queenslanders for Work program, which works on language skills and integration in society. We facilitate tours for our staff to visit other workplaces and get a sense of what employment opportunities are out there.

She participated in our financial wellbeing workshops where we taught her how money is managed in Australia, especially in relation to employment. We also supported her to continue her adult migrant English classes at TAFE to work on her communication skills.

As the final step, once she was confident and her goals were clear, we helped this particular lady do a work trial at the workplace of one of our customers. We're lucky that many of our customers partner with us as employment partners. They see the benefit in our work and want to support it.

One of our employment partners gave her a work trial as a housekeeper and then offered her employment. She did a great job and the company was keen to assist her journey. Now she’s enjoying work as a housekeeper and continuing her studies as a youth worker. It’s a really great outcome for this particular staff member; it's aligned to her goals.

That's a great example of the impact we're able to have. She's participating not just in work, but in society much more confidently because she's had these exposures to language and study support. She's managed the task of getting to and from work, engaging with a supervisor around attendance, and all the different aspects that come with gainful employment. She's feeling empowered and now we can give that same opportunity to someone else.

It's great to see how involved Vanguard Laundry is at every step of the way.

You wouldn't see a normal commercial laundry have an employment pathways coordinator or a job work skills coach on their team. Those roles are quite unique to us as a social enterprise laundry, but they're the most critical roles in my point of view.

They work hand in hand with our transitional staff, to be a part of their entire employment journey, their wellbeing, and their engagement in community. That's how we get those great outcomes. They're really critical roles. That was where I started and I'm still as passionate today that we have great people in those positions.

Throughout your work at Vanguard Laundry, what have been some of the biggest challenges and have you found any similarities between those challenges and those at other social enterprises?

There's a long list of challenges that social enterprises share. Accessing the right capital at the right time is certainly a challenge. In the early days, that was well handled by Luke Terry. That's the unique skillset he brings to the sector. We're at a different phase of our journey now and we're looking to expand our impact. That brings a whole new set of challenges around accessing capital.

The sector is changing, I think for the better. A lot of the funders we relied upon to get to this point have completely different strategies around supporting and advocating for the sector. It's not as simple as sharing a great plan and getting them to jump on board.

I’m really excited to see more government level initiatives, specifically the Queensland government, which I think is leading Australia in terms of supporting social enterprises, and initiatives like the Social Entrepreneurs Fund, which is yet to be deployed.

While some social enterprises are business to consumer or maybe exclusively business to government, Vanguard Laundry is business to business. Sadly, creating social impact is not always a unique sales proposition to our customers. It incurs extra cost for us to run both our laundry and employment program. There's a lot of customers that don't have ESG frameworks or procurement processes that incentivise purchasing from us, and therefore we're just competing for bottom dollar.

That makes it hard to scale efficiently while preserving our impact. You find an ebb and flow between being able to afford providing the impact and playing the scaling game. More broadly, I do believe humanity is improving. People want to make sure their dollars are making a positive impact on the world. However in our experience, it's not always valued the way it should be.

There's also a real challenge for social enterprises when looking at automation and the use of AI. There’s a balance between managing efficiency and impact. While we could almost fully automate our laundry, we’d have a number of job losses as a result, and therefore we wouldn't create the impact we have from an employment perspective.

We take a hit not just in expelling extra resources in employment supports, but also in a loss of efficiency. We're constantly assessing, analysing, and forecasting what level of automation is the right level.

Our sustainability journey is also important. Luckily there's plenty of great sustainability options for laundries. They're costly, but it's something that, with access to the right capital, we can afford to commit ourselves to.

However, it’s the technological automation, robotics, and AI spaces where our competitors will keep advancing in, that we have to keep a close eye on. We have to keep track of the cost of not implementing these advancements as a trade-off in continuing to provide employment.

It's a tension that a lot of social enterprises navigate, in having to manage the commercial and social aspects of the business. That's a key part of my job, and really, it's what I love. It keeps me engaged and gets me up in the morning, and it’s certainly not a tension that's going away anytime soon.

Over the course of your career, what have been some of the biggest lessons you've had to learn?

There's a lot of things that I've observed and learnt about the sector in my short time. For starters, it’s good to have a bit of a weariness about you. Sadly, not everyone is in it for the right reasons. There's a ‘buyer beware’ caution that I'd put on a lot of initiatives that claim to have social impact. It's easy to greenwash or make a claim that may be true, but what's the whole picture?

I'm really passionate about the social enterprise sector holistically, and taking control of how we define it, how we certify social enterprises, and how we protect social enterprise. My main interest is particularly in the employment space. That's a challenge for the whole sector.

The sector is full of amazing people, both in it and on the fringes of it. Aspirationally, people want to have more impact with their dollar and their time. As a leader, there's a balance between finding and harnessing the talents of amazing people to build the sector, while also making sure not to take advantage of those people.

There's a lot of talk of sector burnout, particularly with founders. There’s a challenge for the sector in finding that next level of leadership capacity so that we can continue to scale the maturity of the sector. I’m mindful of that in my role as a leader. It’s my job to really value people, to elevate them and give them the opportunity to learn and grow, without using them.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating social change?

I love to keep it local. I’m inspired by the TIACS initiative run by the fellows at TradeMutt. I can really see the impacts of that in the regional geography we're in, as well as the blue-collar space. It's such an accessible model and it really makes mental health support manageable. I think work wear is a great way to do that. Hats off to those guys!

I also love seeing other community-based enterprises winning local contracts, things like Ability Enterprises in Toowoomba, who've just won the recycling contract with the local council. It’s such a win for the community.

I was also fortunate recently to be on the Brisbane Social Enterprise Tour that Tom Allen and the team at Impact Boom organised. Getting down to the Food Connect Shed and seeing what everyone is doing, their passion and, and the tapestry they're creating for supporting entrepreneurs like Blind Boy Brewing and Boe Design was really cool.

In case anyone’s not aware, I'm excited about attending the Social Enterprise Jobs Summit coming up in June. It's being organised by Social Enterprise Australia and White Box Enterprises and it's first of its kind that I'm aware of. It’ll be such an exciting opportunity to hear about some of the great initiatives, learn some lessons from some recent projects, and uncover some more great models, organisations, and entrepreneurs.

To finish off, did you have any books or resources that you'd like to recommend to our listeners?

I wish I read more and I'm hoping to pick up a couple of books when I go on holidays soon. I do commute a fair bit though, so I listen to a few podcasts. I really like the TDM Growth Partners podcast. They have one called Scaling Up, which is hosted by an ex Australian cricketer. They interview CEOs, CFOs, and CPOs of Australian companies that they've helped scale. You get some insight into how they did it and their overall journey.

Similar but different is the share trading platform Superhero; they have their own podcast as well. It's called Sidekick. The boys at Equity Mates host it and they interview the founders and CEOs of big Australian companies to get an insight into their ‘superpowers’, and how they've scaled and grown their work.

I love hearing from founders and anyone with passion or a heavy investment in whatever they're doing. There's some really successful people on those podcasts, so they're two I'd recommend.

On a book front, I have to go back to an old favourite. It's the book I first read about social impact, and it got me interested in the sector more broadly. When I travelled with G Adventures, the travel adventure company, way back when I first got married, I read the book by the founder, Bruce Poon Tip.

The book is called Looptail, and it's his founding story. He describes his journey as a founder in a really heartfelt and vulnerable way, as well as his growth in becoming a great leader and keeping his focus on people and impact. If you haven’t read it, you might struggle to get your hands on it. I've got a copy somewhere, so feel free to reach out to me. It’s an enthralling read, his vulnerability as a leader is really insightful and challenging as well.